“productive” here means, of course, that your cough results in you bringing up lots of mucus, not that your cough helps you earn a living). The cough starts off being intermittent, but soon recurs for longer and longer periods and finally becomes permanent. Needless to say, chronic bronchitis is also associated with significant and progressive shortness of breath, especially on exertion.
....In emphysema, chronic inflammation in the air passages leads to a loss of elasticity in those little alveoli that are the keys to oxygen transfer in the lungs. Unfortunately, when the alveoli lose their ability to expand and contract, they trap air within themselves, leading to such symptoms as shortness of breath, wheezing, cough, and the gradual development of a “barrel chest” as the emphysematous person uses more and more of his chest muscles to try to get a normal breath in and out.
....What causes COPD? Well, since COPD happens primarily in smokers, it doesn’t take the IQ of a Nobel Prize winner to figure out that smoking is the number one cause of COPD. Not only that, when COPD happens in non-smokers - a recent study found that over one-quarter of the people diagnosed with COPD had never smoked, or at least they didn’t admit to ever having smoked – it’s likely that these people ended up with damaged lungs as a result of exposure to secondary smoke intake.
....Genes also play a role in some cases of COPD. In fact, one rare form of genetically determined emphysema is known as alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency (these people are missing an enzyme that protects normal lung tissue), and these people generally end up with emphysema at much younger ages than smokers do.
....As well, and I don’t think this has gotten nearly the attention it deserves from researchers, air pollution has probably also played a role in the dramatic rise in COPD cases we’ve witnessed the last few decades.
As to other lifestyle factors, there’s little evidence to link alcohol use, exercise, diet, or sleep levels to the development of COPD, although as always, once you have COPD, you deteriorate more slowly if you follow a healthier lifestyle.
....COPD is diagnosed very easily through a simple breathing test known as spirometry, during which a contraption you breathe into measures how much air you can take in and how fast you can breathe it out (the latter is a measure of how much air you trap in your lungs through obstruction to the airflow). Spirometry is a very sensitive test. That doesn’t mean, of course, that spirometry’s feelings can be easily hurt, but rather that |
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